Exclusive Excerpt: Nobel Winner Mo Yan’s ‘Sandalwood Death’

Chinese writer Mo Yan was named the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature this morning, beating out better-known writers who had been thought to be frontrunners such as Haruki Murakami, Alice Munro and William Trevor.

Mo Yan, who has cited magical realist Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a strong influence, is a prolific author who writes in Chinese, and whose works are translated into multiple languages. One of his books, “Sandalwood Death,” (published as “Tanxiangxing” in Chinese in 2001) will be published in English by the University of Oklahoma Press in early January 2013 with a print run of 5,000 copies. “Sandalwood Death” will be the second volume in the Chinese Literature Today Series, a new 10-volume book series that focuses on contemporary Chinese literature.

“Sandalwood Death” is set in the time of the Boxer Rebellion, and centers on the relationship between a woman, Sun Meiniang, and three paternal figures in her life, including her biological father, Sun Bing. The book exhibits a range of styles, from arias and poems, and its language includes the idiom of late Imperial China as well as contemporary prose. It has been translated into English by Howard Goldblatt.

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An exclusive excerpt from “Sandalwood Death” by Mo Yan, reprinted with permission from the University of Oklahoma Press:

That morning, my gongdieh, Zhao Jia, could never, even in his wildest dreams, have imagined that in seven days he would die at my hands, his death more momentous than that of a loyal old dog. And never could I have imagined that I, a mere woman, would take knife in hand and with it kill my own husband’s father. Even harder to believe was that this old man, who had seemingly fallen from the sky half a year earlier, was an executioner, someone who could kill without blinking. In his red-tasseled skullcap and long robe, topped by a short jacket with buttons down the front, he paced the courtyard, counting the beads on his Buddhist rosary like a retired yuanwailang, or, better yet, I think, a laotaiye, with a houseful of sons and grandsons. But he was neither a laotaiye nor a yuanwailang—he was the preeminent executioner in the Board of Punishments, a magician with the knife, a peerless decapitator, a man capable of inflicting the cruelest punishments, including some of his own design, a true creative genius. During his four decades in the Board of Punishments, he had—to hear him say it—lopped off more heads than the yearly output of Gaomi County watermelons.

My thoughts kept me awake that night, as I tossed and turned on the brick kang, like flipping fried bread. My dieh, Sun Bing, had been arrested and locked up by County Magistrate Qian, that pitiless son of a bitch. Even if he were the worst person in the world, he would still be my dieh, and my mind was in such turmoil I could not sleep, forestalling any possibility of rest. I heard large mongrels grunting in their cages and fat pigs barking in their pens—pig noises had become dog sounds, and dog barks had turned into pig songs. Even in the short time they had left to live, they were tuning up for an opera. If a dog grunts, it is still a dog, and when a pig barks, it remains a pig. And a dieh is still a dieh, even if he does not act like one. Grunt grunt, arf arf. The noise drove me crazy. They knew they would be dead soon. So would my dieh. . .

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